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Apparently so, given that one of the most widely viewed versions of the 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up” on YouTube has been taken down due to a copyright claim filed by AVG Technologies. (This particular link appears on the image board 4chan alone some 3,720 times and at a couple hundred thousand other places around the Web.) It’s still unclear exactly when the video was pulled, though TorrentFreak calls it a new development.

Rickrolling, for the uninitiated, is the practice of making a link seem like it’s about one thing, only to then actually link to Rick Astley doing his oddly dad-like dancing. (We hear people on the Internets find this hilarious!)

But here’s what’s odd about this entire affair: AVG Technologies is a computer security software company founded in the Czech Republic over 20 years ago. It doesn't likely hold the copyright to the Astley video. And the official VEVO version of the video remains live on YouTube. “You know the rules, and so do I,” Astley sang—but we're not actually sure that we do in this case.

Ars has contacted AVG and YouTube for comment and will update this story when we hear more—after all, we “gotta make you understand.” (OK, we’ll stop now.)

UPDATE: That video seems to work now (it wasn't working earlier, we swear!). But we're still waiting to hear back from AVG and Google/YouTube about how something like this could happen.

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar